Movie Review: “Creature”

I’ve reviewed a lot of things. I generally pick those movies and television programs that I fully expect are going to be horrible (as evidenced here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here (and a couple others that time has misplaced…)). I do this because it’s fun. I suffer through these horrible wastes of time, talent and money, because they’re ultimately so easy to mock. Sure, people, real life human people with hopes and dreams and feelings made these things, some of them believing that they had just completed their life’s purpose. But fuck them, they made me watch their horribleness by causing it to exist and I’m a nobody on the internet who can crassly pull their passions apart, safely tucked behind a keyboard and never have to look upon their tear soaked faces, pummeled by my hurtful words. So by god I’m a gonna!

But somehow I feel differently about “Creature”. I feel like it’s somehow my fault.

Tuesday morning as I was browsing my usual news sources for things that made me angry enough to yell at them for a couple hundred words, I came upon a story about a movie that debuted to the worst wide release opening ever. 1507 screens showed “Creature” last weekend. It made $327,000. That’s $217 per screen. At an average of $12 a ticket, that’s about 18 tickets sold for the entire weekend for each screen showing this movie. The theater I went to see it at had five showings of it listed on their schedule and the man at the counter told me that they’d sold two tickets for it that day. I had no illusions when walking into the theater yesterday evening that I was somehow stumbling into a misunderstood gem, but in a world where “Shark Night: 3D” can exist and make millions of dollars, I simply had to see a movie that had only managed to eek out one of the worst box office performances in the history of motion picturey…

But in the end, no. No, I simply hadn’t had to.

A movie as bad as “Creature” defies reviewification. To try to review it as a movie would be pointless. Those sort of standards do not apply in such a case as this one. What could I possibly say that it doesn’t already so eloquently express on its own? When a movie introduces itself to its audience with multiple angles of full frontal lady parts in a two minute long swamp skinny dip that concludes with her pulling her screaming de-legged carcass out of the water and delivering a powerful image of genital confusement in a taught female turd splitter, resting just above a pair of sexy bleeding leg holes, you have pretty much met its soul.

I have pages of notes in my handy dandy little pocket notebook that I had been taking while still under the false assumption that what was being projected before me was a movie. I could recant my thoughts on scenes filled with “fidgety hillbillies with vague plans” or my lingering questions like “Have you ever been so drunk on wine and attempted lesbian rape that you completely slept through a growling gator monster kicking over your tent, dragging you back to its cave and, apparently, carefully reassembling your tent around you?”

That is written in my notebook. Those words exist all in that order, expressing that thought as it was expressed to me through a motion picture that I paid twenty-five dollars and fifty cents to see.

And maybe that’s what makes “Creature” so personal. I bought two tickets to this movie, at full price and sat in a nearly empty theater, sharing in the confusion and disbelief of the rest of the bewildered “crowd”. It’s not often that the price of your ticket can make such a perceptible impact on a movie’s gross. Usually, box office numbers are so grotesque that your $12.75 just seems laughable on a the pile of a Hollywood blockbuster. But with a movie that is this colossal a failure, you can actually see your crinkled bills lounging in the sparsely populated pile.

It is because of this that I feel weirdly connected to this movie. I can’t tear it apart appropriately, in part because it’s so beyond description, but also because with such a miniscule gross, I feel like an investor. A producer. Like my name should be on the credits for the $25.50 I put into it. And as such, I am ashamed. In a way that I know no other involved with the making of this film is capable of feeling.